What I’ve learned about life lessons

For as long as I can remember I looked at life lessons as these things that I needed to tick off a list in order to get a gold star and move onto the next one (even as a little girl I guess I was a typical type A over achiever). Needless to say, one of my biggest life lessons has been patience (almost there I swear… come on already). Through all the impatience and my readings with people, I’ve come to realize that in fact, life lessons are actually more like life themes than lessons. And that they are actually more about the time spent getting it wrong than they are about the time spent getting it right. Here’s why….

As we are spiritual beings having a human experience, we come into this incarnation with a bunch of things our soul chooses to experience in order to help us grow. The reason that I see them more as life themes that we choose to experience rather than life lessons is that the lesson bit comes right at the end, once we have experienced the theme from all angles.

We can choose to experience our lessons for one lifetime or many (and we generally have a couple going on at once during each lifetime). It’s just as important to experience all 360 degrees of the lesson (theme), as it is to get it right and move on to the next. 

Let’s take the theme of self love as an example. If you’ve chosen to experience self love you’ve chosen to experience self love from all different angles.

So you might start by finding it hard to love yourself. You could have been born into a family where you didn’t get taught self worth or felt guilty for putting yourself first. Perhaps you go through a stage of hating yourself and resenting people who put themselves first. You may spend years putting yourself last before learning that in order to give more to others you need to be filled up first. You could find yourself in bad relationship after bad relationship before deciding that even though you love them you actually love you more (I love you Samantha Jones).

Perhaps you actually abuse yourself in some way (food, words, name your poison) or let yourself be taken advantage of by others. You might find yourself on the receiving end of being in relationship with someone who doesn’t love themselves and get frustrated as hell as they mirror you back. You may eventually learn to like yourself, entertain the thought of loving yourself and then dare to go all in. After which you could find yourself as a beacon for people who struggle with the same thing you have just overcome and get annoyed at how they won’t just help themselves. 

Regardless of how long it takes for the lesson to be learned, the years spent loathing yourself are just as important as the ones when you are finally head over heels in your bubble of self love. So it’s just as much about getting it wrong as it is about getting it right.

When I share this with someone at one of my workshops or on a live call for my Membership, there’s often a whopping sigh of relief and a drop of the shoulders. Us spiritual overachievers put so much pressure on ourselves to get it right that sometimes we miss the value of the time spent in getting it wrong.

And the best bit? When we truly explore a life theme from all angles, we can then be the shining light for others on a similar path – which continues  our exploration of our chosen theme even more… I guess it’s true that this school of life thing is never-ending!